Tuna Closely Related To Some Of The Strangest Deepsea Fish Global, September 17, 13

A team of scientists has discovered that tuna is
closely related to some of the strangest fish in the sea. The study combined DNA
analysis of over 5,000 modern fish species with fossil evidence to solve a
mystery of which species was closest to tuna.

One of tuna’s closest relatives is a deep sea fish,
the black swallower, which has an extendable stomach that gives it the ability
to eat fish larger than itself. Manefishes, some with spiky fins are cousins to
the tuna despite having different body shapes and lifestyles. The team included Oxford University scientists and
was led by Dr. Masaki Miya at the Chiba Natural History Museum in Japan. They
suggest that the extended family of fish owe success to the extinction that
marked the demise of dinosaurs and many other creatures. Their journal, ‘PLOS ONE’ calls the extended tuna
family tree, ‘Pelagia’. Miya said: “What was immediately clear from our result
is that the extended family of tunas and mackerels is made up of fish that all
look different from one another, with different ways of life, but which share
one key trait: they all dwell in the open ocean.“This had been suggested before, but we were unable
to show that many additional groups of fishes inhabiting the open ocean-called
the pelagic realm – were closely related to one another and to
tunas.”According to the team the new findings give a
different way of thinking about past extinctions.